03-20-2025, 07:47 PM
I always thought nostalgia should be reserved for the future, not the past. (I recognize that is non-sensical, only mean to say that as fondly as we remember yesterday, it was really probably a shit show.)
I recently read Bissinger's The Mosquito Bowl. He's the author of Friday Night Lights. The unifying event was a football game between the 4th and 29th Regiments of the 6th Marine Division, played on a dirt and coral field on Guadalcanal right before the invasion of Okinawa. The regiments had prominent college and NFL players. The game ended in a scoreless tie and barely occupies two pages of the narrative. The narrative is about love and war and life in the late '30s and early '40s and an ungodly casualty rate among game participants.
My grandfather invaded Saipan in 1944 as a LCDR one month before turning 43, losing the use of his right arm in the process, and I still have his yearbook about all of that. Brutal, brutal times. No longing to go back to that.
As related to this thread, if you think the NIL/Portal era is the wild west, it was nuts during the war. Star players (all white of course) moved around in V12 programs and played wherever they were stationed, and there were examples of players suiting up for different teams in the same season. Army and Navy (especially Army) dominated because that was a way to basically dodge the war with three years at an academy guaranteed. Supposedly Iowa Pre-Flight missed the 1943 national championship by one missed extra point against Notre Dame.
Stanford temporarily dropped football in 1943, I believe.
I recently read Bissinger's The Mosquito Bowl. He's the author of Friday Night Lights. The unifying event was a football game between the 4th and 29th Regiments of the 6th Marine Division, played on a dirt and coral field on Guadalcanal right before the invasion of Okinawa. The regiments had prominent college and NFL players. The game ended in a scoreless tie and barely occupies two pages of the narrative. The narrative is about love and war and life in the late '30s and early '40s and an ungodly casualty rate among game participants.
My grandfather invaded Saipan in 1944 as a LCDR one month before turning 43, losing the use of his right arm in the process, and I still have his yearbook about all of that. Brutal, brutal times. No longing to go back to that.
As related to this thread, if you think the NIL/Portal era is the wild west, it was nuts during the war. Star players (all white of course) moved around in V12 programs and played wherever they were stationed, and there were examples of players suiting up for different teams in the same season. Army and Navy (especially Army) dominated because that was a way to basically dodge the war with three years at an academy guaranteed. Supposedly Iowa Pre-Flight missed the 1943 national championship by one missed extra point against Notre Dame.
Stanford temporarily dropped football in 1943, I believe.